dc mom/policy wonk's musings on work, parenthood, gender, politics, and the rest of life

April 26, 2009

trackbacks

With great regret, I think I'm going to set this blog to reject trackbacks. For whatever reason, maybe because you don't need to enter a captcha (the funny looking random letters you need to type to enter a comment), I've been getting far more trackback spam than comment spam lately.

While it's not the end of the world to have to go through and delete trackback spam, the fact is that it's been months and months since I've gotten a real trackback. Even when some of my posts have provoked discussion on other blogs (e.g. the conversation about PTAs), no one did trackbacks. Some people posted comments noting that they were writing more on their own blogs, and some I only discovered because I read their posts. It's possible that there are other conversations going on that I'm totally missing.

This makes me sad. When I started this blog, one of the great joys of the medium was when a bunch of us all took on the same topic, with lots of links and trackbacks and back and forth, and it almost felt like being back in college, staying up far too late and arguing passionately about the problems of the world. It's been a while since I've been part of one of those conversations. I'm not sure if blogging has changed, or if I have -- I know when some topics come up (e.g. where are the women bloggers?), I just sort of roll my eyes and move on.

So, I'm turning trackbacks off, but if you feel drawn to respond to one of my posts, I'd love to hear from you.